Almost exactly 24 years after a Slidell area woman was raped in her home, investigators were able to identify a suspect using DNA evidence and track him to Tennessee.

McMinn County Sheriff's OfficeTommy Gurley

A national DNA database last year connected Tommy Ray Gurley, 49, to the 1987 rape and investigators were able to locate and arrest him this week, authorities said.

The case is one of the oldest investigations to yield an arrest for the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office. Investigators say they expect to see more like it as forensic scientists continue conduct DNA analysis on evidence collected in the years before such testing was a standard law enforcement tool.

"It's a testament to the advancements in science and law enforcement," Sheriff's Office Deputy Chief Tim Lentz said.

On Feb. 12, 1987, Gurley allegedly climbed through the window of a home in the Slidell Manor subdivision, Sheriff's Office spokesman George Bonnett said. Once inside, he physically restrained the woman who lived there, told her he was armed and raped her, he said.

The Sheriff's Office put detectives on the case and collected physical evidence that was sent to the State Police crime lab, Bonnett said. However, no suspect was ever arrested in the case.

The investigation stalled and lay dormant for more than two decades, until Gurley's DNA was catalogued in the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, following his 2009 arrest in North Carolina. The system stores DNA information collected by law enforcement from across the country in an effort to aid investigators in identifying suspects.

Details of Gurley's 2009 arrest were not available Wednesday.

At the time of the rape, the forensic use of DNA was still in its infancy, and crime labs did not have the equipment to run analyses on physical evidence.

"DNA was not at the forefront of investigations, and it was cost-prohibitive to do it privately," Lentz said.

Lentz, who was a detective with the agency in 1987, said at that time investigators could only hope to glean a suspect's blood type from physical evidence collected during a rape investigation.

But while the technology of the time could not identify a suspect, the evidence gathered by investigators remained on file. In the intervening years, the state's crime lab has been working through old cases to develop DNA evidence, Lentz said.

Once the evidence from Gurley's case was added to the national database, Sheriff's Office investigators were notified of the match. It took several more months before they were able to locate him in Tennessee.

Late last month, St. Tammany detectives contacted the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations and that agency contacted the authorities in McMinn and Monroe counties, McMinn County Sheriff Joe Guy said. Investigators there were able to locate him and called in the St. Tammany Sheriff's Office to assist in the arrest, Guy said.

Gurley was arrested on Tuesday and confessed to the rape while being questioned by deputies, Guy said.

"Gurley has been in McMinn County for about two years," Guy said. "But he has also lived in several states across the southeast over the last quarter-century, so there will likely be other agencies who will re-submit DNA evidence on other rape cases into the CODIS system due to this arrest."

Bonnett said the Sheriff's Office will look into other rape cases in St. Tammany after Gurley is extradited from Tennessee. He is now being held in the McMinn County Justice Center.

In addition to the rape case and the 2009 arrest, Gurley was also arrested in St. Tammany in 1987 on an unrelated Peeping Tom case in the Slidell area, Bonnett said. The outcome of that case was not clear Wednesday.

Lentz said that while clearing a 24-year-old case is now rare, investigators expect to bring other old cases to closure as analysts go through the piles of old evidence collected over the years.

"This is going to be a somewhat more common occurrence with this CODIS database," he said. "We're going to start clearing more and more cases."

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Jeff Adelson can be reached at jadelson@timespicayune.com or 985.645.2852.